One place you don’t expect to see waves lapping against the shore is in the middle of a desert. But that’s exactly what’s happening deep inside the United Arab Emirates, where a recently formed lake is nestled into the sand dunes, and a new ecosystem is emerging. Dave Clark, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological…
After having launched the space rover Curiosity to Mars, researchers at NASA are now planning to send people to the red planet. Work has begun at Michoud Assembly Facility to find ways by which Mars could be made a reachable planet. It has been reported that the Boeing engineers have been given the responsibility to…
The European Union will spend about 700 million euros ($900 million) to build the world’s most powerful lasers, technology that could destroy nuclear waste and provide new cancer treatments. The Extreme Light Infrastructure project has obtained funding for two lasers to be built in the Czech Republic and Romania, Shirin Wheeler, spokeswoman for the European…
An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft…
Scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton have created a technique called reflectance transformation imaging that may help crack an ancient undeciphered writing system. The aim is to decipher manuscripts written in the so-called proto-Elamite writing system used in ancient Iran from 3,200 to 3,000 B.C. British researchers say new technology…
The world’s deep seafloors are dark and airless places, but vast swaths may pulse gently with energy conducted through a type of newly discovered bacteria that forms living electrical cables. The bacteria were first detected in 2010 by researchers perplexed at chemical fluctuations in sediments from the bottom of Aarhus Bay in Denmark. Almost instantaneously…
The DARPA Robotics Challenge kicked into high gear this week as the organization announced the top teams competing to create robots that can prevent the compounding of human peril in man-made and natural disasters. Spurred by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in which the “Fukushima 50” ventured into a nightmare scenario to prevent a nuclear…
Researchers said global warming has caused the glacial ice on the runway to turn to mush just four years after it was built for about £30 million. It was due to receive about 20 flights each summer but only six have been able to land in the past two years. The runway was supposed to…
From Slate’s Future Tense blog: A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience indicates that human activity triggered a deadly earthquake in southern Spain last year. Meanwhile, the next day in Italy, six scientists and a government official were sentenced to six years in prison for a deadly earthquake last year that they played no…
Outside of science fiction, the topic of sex in space has received surprisingly scant attention. But it was science fiction that inspired Dr. Robert S. Richardson to write an article in the March 1956 issue of Sexology: The Magazine of Sex Science, wherein he describes his vision of what sexual relations might look like when…